The White House Fell Ass-Backwards into Sanctioning Russia

Since entering office 83 lifetimes ago, Donald Trump has shown Russian President Vladimir Putin a sort of slobbering canine loyalty generally reserved for the special relationship between a golden retriever and its master. In that time, he’s leaked confidential information about a classified Israeli intelligence operation to two Russian enjoys; hesitated to blame the Kremlin for quite obviously poisoning an ex-Russian spy; flipped out when he learned that the U.S. had kicked out more Russian diplomats than European countries following the incident; called Putin to congratulate him on his not-at-all sham of an election victory against the express wishes of senior aides; assured Russia that plans for sanctions announced by his own U.N. ambassador were never gonna happen; requested that Russia be let back into the G7 after it was kicked out for invading another European country; and literally sided with Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies during their little summit in Helsinki. Knowing how he feels about the guy, it came as something of a shock when Trump’s Treasury Department sanctioned Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska and his aluminum company Rusal back in April, one of the harshest measures taken against Mother Russia during Trump’s tenure, and one that baffled analysts, as the punishment “seem[ed] disconnected with the actions and words coming from the president.” The sanctions make a lot more sense, though, given the revelation on Wednesday that they were all a big mistake, and only happened thanks to a f--k up on Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s part. Per the Daily Beast:

At a Capitol Hill hearing in January, as lawmakers were hounding him about the Trump administration’s slow implementation of mandatory sanctions against Russia, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was backed into a corner.

And he blurted out something he would come to regret—by accident, the Daily Beast has learned.

“There will be sanctions that come out of this report,” Mnuchin said—a surprise statement, because while Congress had ordered the department to create a report on Russian oligarchs, it didn’t require that any sanctions be imposed based on it.

Mnuchin’s slip-up forced Treasury officials to scramble to come up with a plan that would match the secretary’s under-oath statement, according to four congressional sources directly involved in the sanctions process. . . . According to those sources, Treasury broke protocol and did not coordinate closely with other departments to properly scrutinize Deripaska and evaluate the impact of the sanctions—which roiled global markets and caused aluminum prices to skyrocket, mainly affecting U.S. partners in Europe.

Unsurprisingly, given Putin’s anger over the actions and Trump’s affinity for the guy, Mnuchin has since walked back the sanctions, promising that the measures can be lifted, and claiming in an interview that “The objective was to impact the oligarchs, not to impact the hardworking people of Rusal as a result.” By pure coincidence, Deripaska, who is currently awaiting trial for a cornucopia of financial crimes relating to his work for the Ukraine, has ties to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who might also catch a break from the administration.